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Memory Practices in the Sciences

Author: Geoffrey C. Bowker

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2008-02-15

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0262524899

How the way we hold knowledge about the past—in books, in file folders, in databases—affects the kind of stories we tell about the past. The way we record knowledge, and the web of technical, formal, and social practices that surrounds it, inevitably affects the knowledge that we record. The ways we hold knowledge about the past—in handwritten manuscripts, in printed books, in file folders, in databases—shape the kind of stories we tell about that past. In this lively and erudite look at the relation of our information infrastructures to our information, Geoffrey Bowker examines how, over the past two hundred years, information technology has converged with the nature and production of scientific knowledge. His story weaves a path between the social and political work of creating an explicit, indexical memory for science—the making of infrastructures—and the variety of ways we continually reconfigure, lose, and regain the past. At a time when memory is so cheap and its recording is so protean, Bowker reminds us of the centrality of what and how we choose to forget. In Memory Practices in the Sciences he looks at three "memory epochs" of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and their particular reconstructions and reconfigurations of scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century's central science, geology, mapped both the social and the natural world into a single time package (despite apparent discontinuities), as, in a different way, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. Both, Bowker argues, packaged time in ways indexed by their information technologies to permit traffic between the social and natural worlds. Today's sciences of biodiversity, meanwhile, "database the world" in a way that excludes certain spaces, entities, and times. We use the tools of the present to look at the past, says Bowker; we project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs.

Sorting Things Out

Author: Geoffrey C. Bowker

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2000-08-25

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0262522950

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A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can shape both worldviews and social interactions. What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification—the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

Memory Practices and Learning

Author: Åsa Mäkitalo

Publisher: IAP

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1681236214

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Memory and learning are seen as mental phenomena and generally studied as brain processes, for example, within various branches of psychology and neuroscience. This book represents a rather different tack, based on sociocultural theory, cultural psychology and dialogism. Authors from many different disciplines and countries study memory and learning as practices adopted by people in different interactional and institutional contexts. Studies range from detailed analyses of situated activities to broad sociohistorical studies of cultural phenomena and collective memories such as national narratives and physical symbols for commemorating events and traditions. By focusing on how people engage in remembering and learning, this book provides a necessary complement to currently popular neuroscientific approaches.

Make It Stick

Author: Peter C. Brown

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-04-14

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0674729013

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To most of us, learning something "the hard way" implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners. Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned. Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.

Memory Work

Author: Barbara J. Mills

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13:

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Memory making is a social practice that links people and things together across time and space and ultimately has material consequences. The intersection of matter and social practice becomes archaeologically visible through the deposits created during social activities. The contributors to this volume share a common goal to map out the different ways in which to study social memories in past societies programmatically and tangibly.

Powerful Teaching

Author: Pooja K. Agarwal

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-06-05

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 111952184X

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Unleash powerful teaching and the science of learning in your classroom Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning empowers educators to harness rigorous research on how students learn and unleash it in their classrooms. In this book, cognitive scientist Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D., and veteran K–12 teacher Patrice M. Bain, Ed.S., decipher cognitive science research and illustrate ways to successfully apply the science of learning in classrooms settings. This practical resource is filled with evidence-based strategies that are easily implemented in less than a minute—without additional prepping, grading, or funding! Research demonstrates that these powerful strategies raise student achievement by a letter grade or more; boost learning for diverse students, grade levels, and subject areas; and enhance students’ higher order learning and transfer of knowledge beyond the classroom. Drawing on a fifteen-year scientist-teacher collaboration, more than 100 years of research on learning, and rich experiences from educators in K–12 and higher education, the authors present highly accessible step-by-step guidance on how to transform teaching with four essential strategies: Retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and feedback-driven metacognition. With Powerful Teaching, you will: Develop a deep understanding of powerful teaching strategies based on the science of learning Gain insight from real-world examples of how evidence-based strategies are being implemented in a variety of academic settings Think critically about your current teaching practices from a research-based perspective Develop tools to share the science of learning with students and parents, ensuring success inside and outside the classroom Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning is an indispensable resource for educators who want to take their instruction to the next level. Equipped with scientific knowledge and evidence-based tools, turn your teaching into powerful teaching and unleash student learning in your classroom.

Science of Memory

Author: Henry L. Roediger III

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-04-26

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 9780199727513

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Scientists currently study memory from many different perspectives: neurobiological, ethological, animal conditioning, cognitive, behavioral neuroscience, social, and cultural. The aim of this book is to help initiate a new science of memory by bringing these perspectives together to create a unified understanding of the topic. The book began with a conference where leading practitioners from all these major approaches met to analyze and discuss 16 concepts that are crucial to our understanding of memory. Each of these 16 concepts is addressed in a section of the book, and in the 66 succinct chapters that fill these sections, a leading researcher addresses the section's concept by clearly stating his or her position on it, elucidating how it is used, and discussing how it should be used in future research. For some concepts, there is general agreement among practitioners from different fields and levels of analysis, but for others there is general disagreement and much controversy. A final chapter in each section, also written by a leading researcher, integrates the various viewpoints offered on the section's concept, then draws conclusions about the concept. This groundbreaking volume will be an indispensable reference for all the students and researchers who will build upon the foundation it provides for the new science of memory.

Boundary Objects and Beyond

Author: Geoffrey C. Bowker

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-02-26

Total Pages: 559

ISBN-13: 0262331020

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The multifaceted work of the late Susan Leigh Star is explored through a selection of her writings and essays by friends and colleagues. Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was one of the most influential science studies scholars of the last several decades. In her work, Star highlighted the messy practices of discovering science, asking hard questions about the marginalizing as well as the liberating powers of science and technology. In the landmark work Sorting Things Out, Star and Geoffrey Bowker revealed the social and ethical histories that are deeply embedded in classification systems. Star's most celebrated concept was the notion of boundary objects: representational forms—things or theories—that can be shared between different communities, with each holding its own understanding of the representation. Unfortunately, Leigh was unable to complete a work on the poetics of infrastructure that further developed the full range of her work. This volume collects articles by Star that set out some of her thinking on boundary objects, marginality, and infrastructure, together with essays by friends and colleagues from a range of disciplines—from philosophy of science to organization science—that testify to the wide-ranging influence of Star's work. Contributors Ellen Balka, Eevi E. Beck, Dick Boland, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Janet Ceja Alcalá, Adele E. Clarke, Les Gasser, James R. Griesemer, Gail Hornstein, John Leslie King, Cheris Kramarae, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Karen Ruhleder, Kjeld Schmidt, Brian Cantwell Smith, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm L. Strauss, Jane Summerton, Stefan Timmermans, Helen Verran, Nina Wakeford, Jutta Weber

The Emergence of Genetic Rationality

Author: Phillip Thurtle

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 0295987502

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Both the science of genetics and the practice of breeding plants or animals required extensive record keeping. The author claims that modern science was born when organizational systems (e.g., vertical files, standardized forms, and middle managers) were developed to manage and make sense of massive amounts of information. He argues that the introduction of such information processing forms, along with the cultural incentives for implementing them, sparked new ways of exploring how living forms were related to each other.

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

Author: Michael Strevens

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1631491385

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“The Knowledge Machine is the most stunningly illuminating book of the last several decades regarding the all-important scientific enterprise.” —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex A paradigm-shifting work, The Knowledge Machine revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science. • Why is science so powerful? • Why did it take so long—two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics—for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe? In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument. Like such classic works as Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine grapples with the meaning and origins of science, using a plethora of vivid historical examples to demonstrate that scientists willfully ignore religion, theoretical beauty, and even philosophy to embrace a constricted code of argument whose very narrowness channels unprecedented energy into empirical observation and experimentation. Strevens calls this scientific code the iron rule of explanation, and reveals the way in which the rule, precisely because it is unreasonably close-minded, overcomes individual prejudices to lead humanity inexorably toward the secrets of nature. “With a mixture of philosophical and historical argument, and written in an engrossing style” (Alan Ryan), The Knowledge Machine provides captivating portraits of some of the greatest luminaries in science’s history, including Isaac Newton, the chief architect of modern science and its foundational theories of motion and gravitation; William Whewell, perhaps the greatest philosopher-scientist of the early nineteenth century; and Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. Today, Strevens argues, in the face of threats from a changing climate and global pandemics, the idiosyncratic but highly effective scientific knowledge machine must be protected from politicians, commercial interests, and even scientists themselves who seek to open it up, to make it less narrow and more rational—and thus to undermine its devotedly empirical search for truth. Rich with illuminating and often delightfully quirky illustrations, The Knowledge Machine, written in a winningly accessible style that belies the import of its revisionist and groundbreaking concepts, radically reframes much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.